How a file storage system can help advance neuroscience

The other day I received an email from Stanford psychologist Russell Poldrack, PhD, letting me know about a new study, about which he wrote, “A format for how people should arrange their files probably sounds like the most boring thing on earth.” I really couldn’t have agreed with him more. File storage? Yawn. But he went on to describe the paper, which appeared recently in Nature, as an example of how creating a community standard – in this case laying out how to organize files containing brain images – could make it easier for scientists to share data and collaborate. Getting science done is something that I do care about, so I decided to give Poldrack a chance. In the article, Poldrack and his co-authors point out that imaging data from…